Eerie photos from the Magdalene Laundries show ‘fallen women’ put to work and grim-faced nuns watching over crowds of kids
THEY SHOULD have been the safe places where young children were able to enjoy the happiest times of their lives growing up alongside their young mothers.
But eerie black and white photos have shown the horrors of the Magdalene Laundries where so-called 'fallen women' were put to work and grim faced nuns watched over crowds of kids.
The laundries, set up across the world, were to house 'undesirable' women and children who were unable to live with their families.
The term 'fallen women' was used to to imply female sexual promiscuity, and most of the young females living in them had children out of wedlock and were forced into hard labour.
The institutions have sparked great controversy and only earlier this month, a mass septic tank containing the skeletons of 800 babies was found in County Galway, Ireland.
It is thought that the deceased infants were secretly buried in the 1950s with unborn fetuses and bodies of even three-year-olds discovered.
Named after the Bible's redeemed prostitute, Mary Magdalene, the workhouses were used to reform women but they soon expanded to take in girls who were considered 'promiscuous'.
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This included unmarried mothers, criminals, people with mental illness and girls who were seen as a burden on their families.
Many of those who lived in the homes have spoken out of the abuse they suffered, including Irish woman Kathleen Legg whose nightmare of being in the ‘care’ of nuns still haunts her.
She explained: “The memories are still there. There are some things you can't block out. Until the day I die, it will be with me.'
Kathleen recalled some of the work she was forced to do, adding: "There were great big heavy rollers. The sheets would be red hot.
"It would be the work of an adult man. I was up at six in the morning and every time the bell rang you went where you were told to go.
"I didn't know how old I was. There were no mirrors and birthdays were never celebrated.'
Rather than getting an education, once she entered the convent Kathleen was stripped naked and given a uniform, she wouldn't see another classroom for four years.
She said: "For the next four years I would scrub, polish and clean every inch of that building, working long hours in the laundry. I had my name changed and I was known as number 27.
"The nuns treated me and indeed others in there as slaves."
Last week we brought you fascinating black and white pictures of mums and kids through the ages that prove that some things never change.
While we also reported on disturbing black and white photos from the 1930s that reveal the miserable lives of patients in a mental hospital.